Pointwise, Inc. sponsored five teams for the SAE Collegiate Design
Series 2012, including teams in the Formula SAE®,
Formula HybridTM and SAE Aero Design®
East and West competitions.

The SAE series, intended to provide undergraduate and graduate
engineering students with a real-life engineering challenge, has been
designed to provide exposure to the kinds of situations common in the
professional environment. Primarily a design competition, students
perform trade studies and make compromises to arrive at a design
solution that will optimally meet the mission requirements while
conforming to the configuration limitations. Teams drive their vehicles
or fly their planes as part of the event to give the competition
grounding in the real world.

The teams sponsored by Pointwise this year were

The Flying Dutchmen from Union College in Schenectady, NY, entered
in the Aero Design East competition

The Assailing Falcons from Vellore Institute of Technology in Tamil
Nadu, India, entered in the Aero Design West competition

The UTA Formula SAE Racing team from the University of Texas at
Arlington, entered in the Formula SAE Lincoln competition

The UTA Formula Hybrid team from the University of Texas at
Arlington, entered in the Formula Hybrid competition

The Bigg Bird team from Ohio Northern University in Ada, OH, entered
in the Aero Design East competition.

Highlights from some of the teams are listed below.

UTA Formula SAE Design Couples Pointwise with Optimizer

This is the second year the UTA Formula SAE team has used Pointwise in
their design process. They were able to use Pointwise for both 2D and 3D
analysis and to couple it with optimization software through the Glyph
scripting language.

This year's team began by analyzing the previous year's design to
determine the area with the best opportunity for improvement. They
decided the wings were the place they could gain the biggest
improvements through increased downforce. Wing optimization proceeded
in two steps: an exhaustive search for optimal airfoil profile shapes,
and then use of a genetic design optimization algorithm to set the
relative positions of the wings. Using Pointwise's T-Rex technology and
Glyph scripting, the team was able to quickly analyze a large database
of airfoil profiles as shown in Figure 1, which resulted in a 30 percent
increase in downforce.

In the second stage of the process, the team used differential evolution
and automated meshing driven by a Glyph script to iteratively find the
best configuration of wing positions. This resulted in an additional 21
percent increase in downforce for a combined improvement of 57 percent
relative to the previous design.

With the wing elements determined, the study was taken to three
dimensions to design endplates and analyze the interaction between the
different aerodynamic components. The endplates were designed to follow
isobars, which kept wingtip losses to only a 5 percent reduction in
downforce.

Figure 2: Pointwise T-Rex mesh on quarter car model.

Figure 3: Pressure contours on quarter car model.

For the front wing, a quarter car model was created to understand the
interaction between the wing and the tire as shown in Figures 2 and 3.
With this new information, they created a 3D endplate that increased
downforce another 11 percent while maintaining identical drag. With all
components finalized, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the
full car (Figure 4) was created in order to fully understand the effects
each component has on the others. As a result, they discovered that the
front wing starved the undertray. But by adding strakes under the front
wing, they were able to get back most of the lost downforce. Future work
in the full car model will take place to allow them to take better
advantage of these interactions.

Figure 4: Flow visualization over complete car.

Ohio Northern University, Union College Compete in SAE Aero Design

The Bigg Bird team from Ohio Northern University and the Flying Dutchmen
team from Union College used Pointwise to help analyze their SAE Aero
Design competition aircraft, and both teams were able to quickly become
proficient with Pointwise and use it for a number of design iterations.

Students in the senior capstone design course at Ohio Northern
University, conducted by Dr. Jed Marquart, were among the first users of
Pointwise when it was released in 2007, so it is natural they use it for
their SAE Aero Design work, as well. Pointwise's ease-of-use, intuitive
operation, ability to quickly make complex grids, and accompanying
tutorials made it easy for students to learn and start using it for
their designs. The ONU Bigg Bird team is shown with their design in
Figure 5.

The Flying Dutchmen used Pointwise to determine a wing planform that
balances aerodynamic efficiency with ease of manufacturing. They used
SolidWorks to create CAD models of various designs, then used Pointwise
to create highly-refined, unstructured meshes that were used for CFD
analysis in STAR-CCM+. The picture of the team in Figure 6 also clearly
shows the wing planform they settled on.

Pointwise in Education

In addition to striving to be the world leaders in CFD meshing,
Pointwise tries to be a good member of the engineering community.
Sponsoring students participating in the SAE Collegiate Design Series is
one way to do that.

“We're thrilled to continue our sponsorship of student teams for these
SAE events,” said John Chawner, Pointwise's president. “Seeing
how CFD
can impact their designs often lights a spark that leads to a career
interest in computational simulation. Or at least, it should improve
their designs and help them place higher in the results. We wish all of
them the best of luck.”

Pointwise also works closely with students through its Pointwise
Teaching Partnership program that provides free licenses to academic
institutions for use in a classroom setting. For more information on the
teaching partnership, visit www.pointwise.com/teaching.

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